STOP10 Feb 2017: '1987: Untracing the Conspiracy'

On 11February
2017 at The Projector, a local documentary titled 1987: Untracing the
Conspiracy will be screened. While the film has been screened before, we strongly recommend this film for so boldly taking on a sensitive yet important topic and the film had been awarded the Best Southeast Asian Feature at Freedom Film Festival 2015. The event will also feature a post-screening Q&A with some of the
ex-detainees and the director, Jason Soo, a graduate of visual and media arts from the University of Melbourne. Aside from being an independent filmmaker he is also an adjunct lecturer in art history.

The film covers Operation Spectrum,an operation where 22
people were arrested under Singapore’s Internal Security Act (ISA) in 1987, accused of
being involved in a Marxist conspiracy to establish a communist state. The detainees were tortured and then coerced into implicating themselves and their
friends on public television. Featuring
interviews with ex-detainees and political exiles, the film focuses on the
first 30 days of their ordeal, including various physical and
psychological techniques used by their interrogators.

Here are excerpts of our interview with Jason, done in 2015.

What first piqued
your interest in Operation Spectrum?

I started with
the intention of making a film that would express the best and worst of
Singapore. And for many years, I tried to find or write a story that would do
this. It wasn’t until I read the book Beyond The Blue Gate by ex-detainee Teo
Soh Lung that I realised I had found my film. In a period when the term
“activism” was not even widely used, the detainees were engaged in various
forms of social work, whether directly in organisations such as Geylang
Catholic Centre, or indirectly through social criticism in plays and books. And
the worst of Singapore was not just how the detainees were imprisoned without
trial and tortured, but also how society allowed such abuses to take place.
Each and every one of us has to take some responsibility for Operation
Spectrum. Each and every one of us did not do enough to change the system that
made such abuses possible. Our indifference or our lack of solidarity allowed
this system to persist, even up till today.

What do you hope
to achieve with this documentary in terms of in the public sphere?

The story of
Operation Spectrum should be known by every Singaporean. It should be also be
in the school textbooks. And taught to every student not just in the way
previous security exercises like Operation Coldstore have been falsified, but
as a lesson in the abuse of power and the consequences of that abuse.

In Singapore
however, education has become less and less about empowering the citizen with
critical thought and knowledge. It is now oriented towards a kind of job
training, so that the individual becomes skilled at performing a specific
number of tasks.

So we have to
ask, do we really have a public sphere that we can speak of? Who is the
Singapore public? Does it even exist, in the concrete, effective sense of the
term, as a space of real, meaningful contestation? We should therefore make a
distinction between what we call a people as opposed to a population. In
Singapore, the people do not yet exist. They do not yet exist as a real, meaningful
collective. What we have instead, is a population. In other words, a numerical
entity, a figure that is measured, managed, and manipulated through statistics
and publicity campaigns. What we therefore need is to create a people, a
collective force who can express their will in a larger movement or who can
express solidarity with the people around them. This does not yet exist, or
only in very limited forms.

I believe cinema
is one way to help make these people come into being.

There will be a
plethora of difficulties you will encounter in the making and distribution of
this documentary; why go through with it and what are your greatest concerns
for yourself and for its censorship within the state?

Censorship is a
problem. But an even bigger problem is self-censorship. Censorship is easier to
resist because it is much more visible, and we know what we are up against. But
today, the way in which control works is harder to detect, because it is
imbedded in us, within us. The person being censored faces a power external to
him, but the person who is censoring himself has internalised that power, and
he now regulates himself. So the difference between censorship and
self-censorship is this difference between an older, repressive method and a
new form of power and control that is less visible and hence more efficient.
You could even say that this new form of power produces us. We are the products
of control. And if we resist, it is to go against these forms of control that
produce us, that gives us our individuality, and that determine the very fibre
of our being, how we should or should not think, act, or behave. The emphasis
on individuality in modern consumer societies is a tool of control. We have to
go beyond the individual, and create a sense of solidarity with each other.
This does not mean we have to subjugate ourselves within a collective; it means
mastering ourselves rather than regulating ourselves; it also means finding new
forms of collectivity based not on conformism but on differences. Easier said
than done. But we first need to have the desire to do all this. And the
awareness to understand how control takes place in our societies.

Is there a
greater statement you wish to reveal with this film?

Besides the
untold stories of the arrests, interrogations, and torture, the focus of the
film is on how something like detention without trial can happen. That means
not just the existence of a law in order to carry out the arrests, but also the
existence of supplementary institutions in order to legitimise it in public
opinion. This was of course done through the mass media and through
parliamentary debates. So purportedly democratic institutions such as
parliament, the judiciary, and the mass media are complicit in the whole
affair.

We all know how
in the absence of an effective opposition, we have a dysfunctional parliament
in which laws are passed without meaningful debates. As for the judiciary,
Jothie Rajah has written an important book in which she makes a distinction
“rule of law” and “rule by law”, in which we have the appearance but not the
substance of legality. As for the mass media, given that the government enjoys
de facto control over broadcasters and newspapers, public opinion can be easily
manipulated.

So all these
people working in these institutions have a role to play in the unfolding of
the story of Operation Spectrum. Each of them has a role to play in order to
legitimise the arrests. And each of them could have done something different.

Can you talk
about any unexpected revelations or discoveries that surprised you the most?

One of the things
that surprised me most when I was researching the film was a BBC news report
from 1990. It described how Singapore was already at that time importing huge
numbers of foreign labour. And that’s why the ex-detainees at Geylang Catholic
Centre were already grappling with the same issues that organisations such as
HOME and TWC2 are facing today. So when the arrests happened, not only was
civil society crippled for the next 20 years, problems such as the lack of
workers’ protection, incorporation of workers’ unions into government-led
organisations, lack of minimum wage, low birth rates, all these were carried
over from the 1980s till today, they become even harder to solve, with the
added problems of rising xenophobia, infrastructural deficiencies, lack of
economic innovation, etc.

I’m not saying of
course that had Operation Spectrum not happened, these problems would not exist
today. But this is just an example of how something like the Internal Security
Act cannot be taken in isolation. It’s not just a law that exists on its own.
It has consequences for the rest of society. We should be concerned. Because
we’re still suffering those consequences today.